ALL THIS AND BARBARA TOO
Page 60
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WITH the first onset of winter the transport situation plummets into chaos. Snow begins to fall a little before dawn and by the time that people are ready to go to work scores of train services are cancelled and others are running late, air traffic is at a standstill, the roads are strewn with abandoned cars and lorries—and local authorities all over the country are no doubt already composing their first draft of an explanation for the almost total absence from the roads of the equipment kept ready for just such an emergency.
The congestion may well have been substantially increased by the dispatch to points of sale—at a guinea a time—of what must easily be the largest Transport Bill on record, running to nearly 300 pages, with 169 clauses and 18 schedules. The public, freezing on stations and at the roadside, would have found little in this tome to ease their present discontents. It contains a large part of the corpus of Mrs. Castle's plans for the future of transport but few of them seem designed to bring much comfort on a frosty morning
Dismay
Operators will find serious matter enough in the Bill. What ought to be the reaction from the public is dismay at its relevance. The really important transport problem is the provision of a proper road system and plans for its construction should be linked with many other pressing problems associated with town and country planning, and including the railways. Harsh experience has brought many people to this conclusion independently and they would have warmed to a Minister who put it clearly in the forefront of her policy.
Instead of this they are offered an unimaginative set of proposals, good, bad and mostly indifferent. There is nothing inspiring in the suggestion that the money which the railways have lost should now also be forgotten. National freight corporations and passenger transport authorities sound too much like dreary variations on a discredited theme. There are elaborate arrangements to transfer a tiny amount of traffic from road to rail. There will be new taxes on an industry whose costs affect the price of everything.
Does this kind of thing faithfully reflect the visionary gleam which many people saw in the eye of Mrs. Castle when she took over her present job? The verdict must be that she should have been able to do better than that. Perhaps if she could start now with the knowledge she has acquired over
the past few years she would ultimately come up with an entirely different Bill.
One disadvantage which all Ministers must face is that once they have pronounced an opinion they would have great difficulty in changing it. If they are to have any peace of mind most of them, probably without being aware of it, must build up a barrier to insulate them from arguments on the other side.
It is not only Ministers who carry this burden of infallibility. The experience is shared by many statutory bodies including the National Board for Prices and Incomes. Inability to contradict themselves may have forced the Board to make some of the statements in their recent report which I am not alone in thinking naive if not absurd.
The report is concerned with charges, costs and wages in the road haulage industry, and one reason for its production was the complaint from the Road Haulage Association that members were in difficulty about obtaining increases in their rates even when these were plainly necessary. The Board had previously studied the subject in sufficient detail to produce two reports and one rebuke. If they were reluctant to return to it they gave no indication. One might have expected a subtle and expert analysis leading to a brilliant conclusion.
Conclusion
Far from it. The only conclusion the Board could reach on charges was that "in general, a haulier would be justified in negotiating higher rates to take account of actual increases in costs which he has not reasonably been able to absorb".
Even the dullest of hauliers could have worked this out for himself. If this Kruschev-sounding saw presents the highest flight of fancy that the Board can reach there seems to have been no point in referring road haulage rates to them in the first place, that is to say in 1965.
Trite though the statement is there is no doubt that hauliers will find it useful as a kind of visiting card when they approach a customer for a rates increase. The Board acknowledge that they may have hoped for more. "The road hauliers would no doubt welcome from us," says the report, "some clear, unequivocal statement on the extent to which they would be justified in increasing their charges, which they would then use as a lever in negotiation with their customers."
There could be many good reasons for dashing this expectation; those which the Board give are strangely unconvincing. It would revive, say the Board, the principle of rate recommendation which they oppose. It does not occur to the Board that perhaps they should take this principle out and give it another airing. Once they have condemned it, as they did in 1965, there can be no going back.
Charitable In the second place the Board point out that a specific statement could not adequately reflect the "complex realities of this diverse industry". This need not have prevented the Board at least from taking one or two examples and showing how in their opinion a proper assessment of costs could be made, with an indication of the extent to which certain items had increased or fallen.
It would be charitable to describe the Board's final reason as paradoxical. They express the conviction that "continued, and possibly more intense, competition is essential" if progress is to be accelerated towards the many reforms in wages and productivity which are discussed elsewhere in the report. As against this the new regulations for safety, it is said, will put competition on a sounder basis "by diminishing the extreme form of competition". Less polite hauliers would describe this as cut-throat competition. Whatever new regulations are introduced it is difficult to see how they will reduce undesirable practices if in the meantime competition is to be made more intense and rates are not allowed to rise.
Road haulage rates were referred to the Board in the first instance not as a result of complaints from the public but because the RHA had followed their customary procedure of recommending an increase. The Board abolished this procedure but have still put nothing practical in its place. The Transport Bill is also removing many old landmarks with no solid assurance that the new alignment will be any better.
Janus